My monthly report covers a large part of what I have been doing in the free software world. I write it for my donators (thanks to them!) but also for the wider Debian community because it can give ideas to newcomers and it’s one of the best ways to find volunteers to work with me on projects that matter to me.

Packaging work

With the Jessie freeze approaching, I took care of packaging some new upstream releases that I wanted to get in. I started with zim 0.62, I had skipped 0.61 due to some annoying regressions. Since I had two bugs to forward, I took the opportunity to reach out to the upstream author to see if he had some important fixes to get into Jessie. This resulted in me pushing another update with 3 commits cherry picked from the upstream VCS. I also sponsored a wheezy-backports of the new version.

I pushed two new bugfixes releases of Publican (4.2.3 and 4.2.6) but I had to include a work-around for a bug that I reported earlier on docbook-xml (#763598: the XML catalog doesn’t allow libxml2/xmllint to identify the local copy of some entities files) and that is unlikely to be fixed in time for Jessie.

Last but not least, I pushed the first point release of Django 1.7, aka version 1.7.1 to unstable and asked release managers to ensure it migrates to testing before the real freeze. This is important because the closer we are to upstream, the easier it is to apply security patches during the lifetime of Jessie (which will hopefully be 5 years, thanks to Debian LTS!). I also released a backport of python-django 1.7 to wheezy-backports.

I sponsored galette 0.7.8+dfsg-1 fixing an RC bug so that it can get back to testing (it got removed from testing due to the bug).

Debian LTS

See my dedicated report for the paid work I did on that area. Apart from that, I took some time to get in touch with all the Debian consultants and see if they knew some companies to reach out. There are a few new sponsors in the pipe thanks to this, but given the large set of people that it represents, I was expecting more. I used this opportunity to report all bogus entries (i.e bouncing email, broken URL) to the maintainer of the said webpage.

Distro Tracker

Only 30 commits this month, with almost no external contribution, I’m a bit saddened by this situation because it’s not very difficult to contribute to this project and we have plenty of easy bugs to get you started.

That said I’m still happy with the work done. Most of the changes have been made for Kali but will be useful for all derivatives: it’s now possible to add external repositories in the tracker and not display them in the list of available versions, and not generate automatic news about those repositories. There’s a new “derivative” application which is only in its infancy but can already provide a useful comparison of a derivative with its parent. See it in action on the Kali Package Tracker: http://pkg.kali.org/derivative/ Thanks to Offensive Security which is sponsoring this work!

Since I have pushed Django 1.7 to wheezy-backports, all distro tracker instances that I manage are now running that version of Django and I opted to make that version mandatory. This made it possible to add initial Django migrations and rely on this new feature for future database schema upgrade (I have voluntarily avoided schema change up to now to avoid problems migrating from South to Django migrations).

This is my monthly summary of my free software related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (26.6 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Django 1.7

Since Django 1.7 got released early September, I updated the package in experimental and continued to push for its inclusion in unstable. I sent a few more patches to multiple reverse build dependencies who had asked for help (python-django-bootstrap-form, horizon, lava-server) and then sent the package to unstable. At that time, I bumped the severity of all bug filed against packages that were no longer building with Django 1.7.

Later in the month, I made sure that the package migrated to testing, it only required a temporary removal of mumble-django (see #763087). Quite a few packages got updated since then (remaining bugs here).

Debian Long Term Support

Distro Tracker

The pace of development on tracker.debian.org slowed down a bit this month, with only 30 new commits in the repository, closing 6 bugs. Some of the changes are noteworthy though: the news now contain true links on bugs, CVE and plain URLs (example here). I have also fixed a serious issue with the way users were identified when they used their Alioth account credentials to login via sso.debian.org.

On the development side, we’re now able to generate the test suite code coverage which is quite helpful to identify parts of the code that are clearly missing some tests (see bin/gen-coverage.sh in the repository).

Misc packaging

Publican. I have been behind packaging new upstream versions of Publican and with the freeze approaching, I decided to take care of it. Unfortunately, it wasn’t as easy as I had hoped and found numerous issues that I have filed upstream (invalid public identifier, PDF build fails with noNumberLines function available, build of the manual requires the network). Most of those have been fixed upstream in the mean time but the last issue seems to be a problem in the way we manage our Docbook XML catalogs in Debian. I have thus filed #763598 (docbook-xml: xmllint fails to identify local copy of docbook entities file) which is still waiting an answer from the maintainer.

GNOME 3.14. With the arrival of GNOME 3.14 in unstable, I took care of updating gnome-shell-timer and also filed some tickets for extensions that I use: https://github.com/projecthamster/shell-extension/issues/79 and https://github.com/olebowle/gnome-shell-timer/issues/25

git-buildpackage. I filed multiple bugs on git-buildpackage for little issues that have been irking me since I started using this tool: #761160 (gbp pq export/switch should be smarter), #761161 (gbp pq import+export should preserve patch filenames), #761641 (gbp import-orig should be less fragile and more idempotent).

This is my monthly summary of my Debian related activities. If you’re among the people who made a donation to support my work (310.73 €, thanks everybody!), then you can learn how I spent your money. Otherwise it’s just an interesting status update on my various projects.

Dpkg: Multi-Arch Saga

I know lots of people are waiting the landing of multiarch in Debian unstable, and so am I. Things are progressing, though not as quickly as I hoped. Guillem merged about half of the branch between the 24th October and the 6th of November. After that most of the work happened on his personal repository in his pu/multiarch/master branch.

I verify this repository from time to time because Guillem does not inform me when he has made progress. I noticed changes on his repository on the 10th, 19th, 23th, 28th of November and on the 1th of December.

He announced a long time ago that he had some “interface changes” and up to now only wrote about the switch from the command-line option --foreign-architecture (to put in /etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg) to the explicit command dpkg --add-architecture that only needs to be called once (see mail here). As of today (December 2th), the promised email for the other interface changes is still not here.

All the issues I reported have been fixed in the latest version of Guillem’s branch although the fixes are often slightly different from those that I submitted.

Dpkg: Squeeze Backport

At the start of the month, I uploaded what I expected to be a fairly uncontroversial backport of dpkg 1.16.1.1. It turns out I was wrong.

After some discussion, I think we came to an agreement that it was acceptable to backport dpkg-dev and libdpkg-perl only. My goal was not to bring the latest dpkg to users but to make it easier for package maintainers to backport packages using new features provided by dpkg-dev >= 1.16 (such as hardening build flags, the makefile snippets provided in /usr/share/dpkg/, or the improved dpkg-buildflags interface).

Thus I modified the source package uploaded to squeeze-backports to build only dpkg-dev and libdpkg-perl. It has been uploaded on November 23th and it’s waiting in the NEW queue for a backports admin to process it.

Misc Dpkg Work

I merged a patch of Colin Watson to be able to verify build-dependencies for a foreign architecture (taking into account the Multi-Arch status of each package listed).

I released dpkg 1.16.1.2 with two minor fixes that were sitting in the sid branch. I wanted to get rid of this so that the path is clear for a 1.16.2 upload with multiarch. The package just migrated to testing so we’re fine.

I spent another day doing dpkg bug triaging on Launchpad, we’re now down to 77 bugs with many of them tagged as incomplete and likely to expire in 2 months.

The Debian Administrator’s Handbook

We released a sample chapter so that it’s easier to have an idea of the quality of the book. The chapter covers the APT tools quite extensively. I bet that even you could learn something about apt-get/aptitude…

The crowfunding campaign on Ulule ended on November 28th.
With 673 supporters, we raised 24345 EUR. Of those, 14935 EUR have been put in the liberation fund and the rest corresponds to the various pre-orders and rewards offered.

This means that the translation will happen (we just started) but that the book is currently not going to be released under a free license. Don’t despair… As planned, the liberation campaign is carried on until the 25 K€ target is reached!

Instead of being hosted on Ulule, this permanent campaign is on the project website at debian-handbook.info/liberation/. Note that any contribution of 10 EUR or more means that you get a copy of the ebook as soon as it’s available (even if the liberation target is not reached).

Package Tracking System

At the start of the month, I filed two ideas of improvements for the PTS in the bug tracking system: #647258 is about showing outstanding bugs that relate to a release goal and #647901 is about warning maintainers that the package is affected by a current transition. If you’re a coder and want to start contributing to Debian and its QA team, those bugs could be interesting targets for a start. In both cases, I have been in contact with members of the release team because those ideas require some structured data from the release team as input. Thanks to Meddi Dohguy and Niels Thykier for their help.

Later in the month, the topic of relocating the PTS once again came up. For historical reasons, the PTS was hosted on master.debian.org together with the BTS. Nowadays the BTS has its own host and it made no sense anymore to have the PTS separate from the rest of the QA services hosted on qa.debian.org (currently quantz.debian.org). So together with Martin Zobel Helas we took care to plan the migration and on November 19th we executed the plan. It worked like a charm and almost nobody noticed (only one undocumented dependency was missed, which broke the SOAP interface).

Misc Packaging Work

WordPress was broken in Ubuntu and it was also not properly synchronized with Debian due to an almost useless change on their side. Thus I requested a sync so that the working version from Debian gets imported in Ubuntu.

I sponsored the docbook-xsl 1.76.1 upload that I needed for Publican. Then I updated Publican just to discover that the test-suite triggers a new bug in fop (filed as #649476). I disabled the test-suite temporarily and uploaded Publican 2.8 to unstable. BTW, I also filed 2 upstream bugs with patches for issues I discovered while trying to generate the sample chapter of my book (see here and here).

I uploaded a version 0.7.1 of nautilus-dropbox and fixed #648215 at the same time. I made an NMU of bison to fix a long-standing release critical bug that hit me once more during an upgrade (see #645038).

I uploaded to experimental a new version of gnome-shell-timer compatible with GNOME 3.2. I took the opportunity to install from experimental the few GNOME 3.2 packages which are not yet in unstable…